


Hand to Mouth

by narrowredoubt



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Homelessness, M/M, Meet-Ugly, food insecurity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:00:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29705817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narrowredoubt/pseuds/narrowredoubt
Summary: Sirius is homeless after spending over a decade in prison and Remus is impoverished and struggles to hold down a steady job. They meet for the first time while scrounging for food out of the dumpster behind the restaurant Remus has just been fired from.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25





	Hand to Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: ACAB, Sirius and Remus are briefly spoken to by cops who target them because Sirius is homeless. Only words are exchanged.  
>  Also note: In my heart of hearts, Remus and Sirius are both Latino, but this doesn't come up in the fic, and you can substitute headcanon whatever you want. The only relevant detail specific to this fic is that Sirius has darker skin than Remus.

Remus numbly heads out the kitchen’s back door, hefting the last of the garbage bags for the night. He has just been informed that he need not come back to work. Tomorrow, or ever, he’d asked. We’re letting you go, his manager had clarified with a frozen, polite expression. Too inconsistent, always limping in late, asked for a day off sick once too often. They didn’t even pay him a wage–it was tips only. When they hired him he’d asked about pay and the figure they’d quoted at him had been a pittance. And then a week had passed, and then another, but the pay never materialized. Remus knew how bad his track record was for getting fired, however, so he kept his mouth shut, his head down, and just pocketed the tips. The sad thing is, the restaurant is popular, and even just with tips he’s made more per week than at his last job. But the frenetic pace of waiting tables at this place is more physically demanding than he’s really able to sustain, and–well, not that it matters anymore. Now that he’s fired.

He doesn’t notice right away that the lid of the dumpster is tipped open. It’s not supposed to be open. In fact, it’s usually only open at the end of Remus’s night shifts because he leaves it that way, the better to steal a loaf of bread or a quiche that’s about to go off. This is how it goes: he exits with his coworkers through the front, lingering to have a smoke, then doubling back to make off with what he left, and lastly locking the dumpster behind him so the morning shift can’t snitch.

Inside the open dumpster, a man is stooped over inspecting other bags of food waste and restaurant detritus. There _might_ be edible food in there, among the vegetable peels and plate scrapings, but the waiters and back-end staff usually polish off the better left-overs– side salads, bread rolls, the stuff that gets sent back to the kitchen without a bite taken out of it. Remus is holding the one bag of the really good stuff–from the pastry case and the bread counter, the stuff that goes untouched. Sandwiches gone slightly stale, leftover loaves of bread, this week’s focaccia that didn’t sell, that kind of thing.

The man looks up, notices Remus and goes still, dark eyes narrowing in calculation. He’s familiar, a homeless guy he’s seen around the neighborhood. They stare at each other. The guy seems to expect Remus to speak first, but Remus, exhausted and crushed by the thought of returning home to another job hunt, doesn’t have any words for him.

What could he even say, “you’re not supposed to be here”? “Stop stealing my former boss’s garbage”? Absurd. Hypocritical, even, as Remus himself is planning on stealing the bag still in his hands if he wants to stretch out the food he has remaining for the week.

But he has to say _something._ He doesn’t have the time to stand around here staring. He has to go back inside. He has his share of the work to finish–it’s not his coworkers’ faults he’s been fired, and if he pulls his weight now maybe it’ll be enough to convince one of them to act as a reference. It’s been a while since he’d had any hope of hearing back from a job that required references, considering his abysmal work history, but if he can just do enough, if he can just show them, then maybe—

“Well?” snaps the guy, patient evidently at an end. “Come on. Are you going to chase me away from your precious restaurant or call the cops or what?”

Remus looks at him blankly for a moment more before gathering what wits he has left at the end of a day as shit as this has been.

“Fuck the restaurant.” Remus says and he holds out the sack of bread and pastries in one hand. “There’s really good food in this one, take it.”

Remus’s arm trembles a little. It is a good amount of food and the bag is heavy.

He doesn’t want to let go of it.

Without the opportunity to finish off other people’s half eaten lunches throughout the day, he’ll be going hungry more and more by the end of the week. If he gives this bag away, the food he has might not last him the amount of time it takes to both get another job _and_ to wait for his first paycheck.

The guy reaches out silently to receive the heavy sack of food. Remus forces himself to pass it over. He wouldn’t normally take the whole bag, they’ll know it was him stealing from the garbage. He tries not to care about this. What are they going to do about it now? He’s already been fired. It’s fine. It has to be fine.

“Are you alright, mate?”

Remus swallows through the tightness in his throat, everything starting to feel like a bit much. It has been a very, very long time since anyone has cared to ask this of him. He tries to get back some of the empty calm he has been coasting on for the past half hour.

“I’m–” he tries, but his throat closes. “They, er, they fired me. Just now.” Remus says, waving a hand at the door to the kitchen. The guy gives a nod of understanding and looks down at the trash bag bulging with food.

“We can split the food, if you want,” he offers. “The whole bag is too much and I don’t have anywhere to keep it, anyway.”

Remus closes his eyes, feeling shaken by the depths of his relief. He is mortified by how easily this stranger has seen through him but he has no room to be ungrateful.

“Thank you,” says Remus. “You can go through it first, take whatever you want–it’s just that, the bread–I can freeze the bread so it keeps longer, so if–”

“Yeah, mate, no problem. The bread’s yours,” he replies easily as he clambers out of the container. Remus offers him a hand automatically to help him down, and the man takes it.

“I have to go back,” says Remus. He aches to sit and share a meal with the other man right there and then, pastry probably still a little warm from the heat of the case. “Where can I find you?”

“I’ll be in the train station on the corner, there’s a bench on the far end–that’s my spot.”

Remus nods, he knows the one. He’s seen the man there when heading home from night-shifts before. This isn’t even the first time he’s walked past and offered him a sandwich or a slice of quiche, although it’s the first time they’ve really spoken. “What’s your name?”

“Sirius Black,” he responds.

Remus offers him his hand once again, to shake. “Remus Lupin,” he introduces himself. In a sudden flash of apparent self-consciousness, there and then gone again, Sirius quickly wipes a hand on his worn trousers before taking it.

“See you soon, Remus.”

-

When he finally comes back inside the kitchen, the last of the closing duties have been finished without him. His coworker, the one with the key, is the last one left waiting up for him. She studiously avoids looking Remus in the face as he folds up the restaurant’s uniform apron for the last time and leaves it neatly on a shelf for whoever replaces him. It’s strange—she’s not acting cruel about it, not ignoring him. She’s simply… giving him space. He realizes suddenly that she must think he’d been out in the alley having a cry. If he still had any pride he might resent the assumption, but to be honest it had been a close thing for a moment or two. Anyway it’s better like this, as it means he doesn’t have to think up a lie to explain himself.

With a quiet goodbye, he goes out the front, ducking under the half-lowered security grille and heads directly to meet Sirius.

-

Heading into the station, Remus braces his hands on either side of the turnstile and heaves himself over it as inconspicuously as possible. Doing it wrong will not only mean sending his bad hip into agony—being spotted could mean getting arrested or hit with a fine, none of which he can afford to deal with. Still, by necessity, he does this maneuver every day. Even when he does it as smoothly as possible—the motion so natural with repetition that a distracted observer might not even notice that he’s getting away with something—it strains his tired arms at the end of a long shift waiting tables.

At the end of the platform, as promised, Sirius sits with their prize taking up a spot on the bench next to him. Remus sits down heavily taking the seat on Sirius’s other side. Sirius is holding a sandwich in one hand and a somewhat squashed danish in the other, alternating bites out of each. He makes a gesture to the bag with the danish, and after taking a moment to swallow, says, “Have at it, then.”

Remus helps himself to the food, leaning across Sirius’s space as he does so. He tears off a chunk of focaccia, and after a moment, follows Sirius’s example and selects a small fruit-filled tart to accompany it. It’s been some time since he was last able to justify the expense or even gather to energy to go out and share a meal with a friend—and this isn’t the same thing at all really, but he allows himself to savor the sliver of contentment from being together with somebody.

They sit in companionable silence for the twenty minutes or so it takes them to eat their fill. A few trains come and go through the station, but no late-night commuters so much as spare them a glance.

Remus is watching Sirius as he picks through the bag again, separating out two sandwiches and several round rolls he can make last, when the other man’s entire posture changes. He doesn’t stop what he’s doing, but moves more slowly, and straightens in his seat. Remus looks around, but doesn’t notice anything amiss right away. The station is quiet and fairly empty.

He leans in, and gently touches Sirius’s elbow.

“Sirius, is everything alright?”

Sirius shakes his head very briefly, just one short motion to the left and right, though Remus isn’t entirely sure whether it’s a response or a rejection of the question altogether.

He doesn’t get it until the pair of police are walking right towards them.

In his head he flips through every instance of jumping the turnstiles for months on end. Then he remembers the enormous bag of food they’ve stolen right there in plain sight.

Remus feels more alert than he has all day, dread pricking him awake. It’s more a sympathetic response to the tension Sirius is radiating next to him than anything innate; Remus has seldom been harassed by police before. He has no idea how this will go, or what they’ll say. He’s never been in a position to learn these things before. After all, Remus is white-passing. Sirius—isn’t.

The officers stroll down to the end of the platform where they are and then turn right around. One of them pauses, almost casually, blatantly searching them with a look from head to toe. Sirius looks back, stilling his motions, but is otherwise impassive to anybody not paying attention. He has the same stillness of waiting from the moment their eyes met in the alley behind the restaurant. Remus thinks to take away his hand from where they’re touching, but without his conscious permission his grip tightens protectively on Sirius’s forearm.

When the cop speaks, he directs his comments at Remus alone.

“Are you one of those religious types or something?”

Remus is completely bemused. Internally, he’s been thinking of himself and Sirius as the same, but now the outward world is getting in the way. To a stranger, their mutually desperate meal apparently resembles charity. A relationship that requires a having as well as a have-not, and lacking the reciprocity and warmth Remus is feeling.

But, well—they _are_ in separate classes. This is underscored in a hundred small ways. Remus has access to a shower every day, his hair is clean and neatly cut. Sirius’s hair is tangled and unevenly long, and there’s a distinct staleness to him that comes from more than just the dumpster diving. Remus is in the station as a daily commuter, he ducks the fare, true, but it’s the train he comes for. Sirius is here very nearly as often, but without a destination. Remus, despite constant petty lawbreaking, is capable of looking at an approaching cop with a mask of polite confusion. Sirius in the same situation must fight himself manage a blankness of expression from sheer necessity. Remus is not unaware of these, their actual differences. But he is also a man who has been living hand-to-mouth for years longer than he thought he could ever go on living that way, and he is terribly aware how small the distance is between them. Close enough to touch.

“Sorry, er, what? Officer?” stammers Remus.

He looks between the cop and Sirius’s face. Being mistaken as part of some kind of church outreach group maybe isn’t a bad lie to fall back on, but something in Sirius’s look gives him pause.

“Helping the homeless? Giving alms? That sort of thing. Is that what you do?”

It’s a trap, it’s undoubtedly some kind of a trap although Remus can’t imagine how. Remus looks again to Sirius and thinks his mouth is infinitesimally tighter in disapproval.

“Er, no. We’re—he’s my friend. We’re just—waiting for the train.”

He seals his mouth shut, perhaps not quickly enough. Would it have been acceptable to just say no? Or would being too short provoke a more thorough questioning? The less said the better is a useful rule, but not an exact science. Why did he blurt that they were friends? Well, maybe it’s a better lie than pretending to be an evangelist or whatever. Lying about being friends has the advantage of being an impossible to prove fiction and… it’s one he privately wouldn’t mind to be true anyway.

“See that you and your friend don’t loiter,” the cop grunts after an uncomfortable amount of eye contact. And he strides away, catching up to his partner without waiting for any kind of response.

Remus takes a moment. Then another. The next train passes through. He stands to see if the cops are still hanging around in some corner, watching to see if they take the train or not. He sits back down. He wants to be able to say the right thing to Sirius, but doesn’t know what it should be.

“Sorry” Sirius says, barely speaking above a murmur. He has his hands gripped tightly together, and is taking calm but deliberately measured breaths. For the first time since they’ve met, Remus looks at him, and feels his heart break.

“No, I should be saying sorry, I had no idea what I was doing,” replies Remus in a rush, “But anybody would do the same. Would lie to the cops, I mean. You have every right to sit and—to just _be_ somewhere and not be harassed. I mean, I know you know that. But I need you to know I know, so—that’s why, er—don’t worry about it.”

The corner of Sirius’s mouth twitches, just a little, the barest downward curve of his lips that Remus notices only because he’s looking for something, anything.

“Thanks, then,” says Sirius. Remus grins in response, wide with his relief at a non-event.

Sirius offers the garbage bag back to him. Even with what he’s taken and what they’ve both eaten, it’s still incredibly full.

“There’s still a lot left, Sirius, take more.”

“Nowhere to put it, I already told you.” He’s tucked his share of the food, just enough to have something for tomorrow and some rolls that might keep for longer, into a thin beaten-up backpack. Another difference between them. Remus will go home and freeze as much of his bread as he can, and the sandwiches and the quiche will live in the fridge and maybe go a bit wilted and sad, but they ought to last as far as he needs.

“If I come by here again tomorrow, can I bring you some more of this for lunch then? Or the rest of the week, really, considering how much there is? It’s better if it doesn’t go to waste.”

Sirius just looks at him for a little while, judging his earnestness, maybe.

“I’m always around. You can probably find me here or around the park a block over. Not tomorrow, though,” he says, gesturing to his bag, “I’m already set. But you can come and find me the day after.”

“Yeah ok, I will. I’ll see you then, Sirius.”

Remus heads home, possibly more uplifted than he should be at making a date to share a few more subpar sandwiches, but it’s something to look forward to. Another quiet moment, a free meal, time spent with a friend.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This work is unbetaed, so I always appreciate corrections and criticism as well as comments--also, if anyone reading would be interested in betaing the next chapter of this, or any of my future fics, please don't hesitate to hit me up on tumblr @narrowredoubt!


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